The invention relates particularly to the recovery of meat from crabs, such as the common edible crabs of the Atlantic coasts of North and South America. The Atlantic crabs referred to includes the blue, rock, sand and other species, and the invention may also be utilized in the treatment of the Dungeness crabs of the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada and crab species found in the North Sea of Europe and elsewhere and having body, leg, and claw conformation similar to those of the blue crab. It will be understood by those skilled in the relevant arts that while the invention is particularly related to the removal of meat from crabs it will also be useful in the removal of meat from the bodies of other crustacea, such as lobster, shrimp and crayfish, after suitable preparation to adapt them to the processing by the method and apparatus according to the invention.
In an operation preliminary to the practice of the invention the crabs are cooked and the legs and claws are then detached, the carapace, gills, mouth parts, apron, and visceral matter are removed in successive operations, and the stripped carcasses are ready to be subjected to the steps of the present invention method.
The use of air or another fluid under pressure in the general art of preparation of crustacea for use is known in such procedures as removal of meat from the shell of the tail of a shrimp (Martin U.S. Pat. No. 3,110,926), removal of the shell from the body of a shrimp (Abbott U.S. Pat. No. 2,546,414), removal of the meat from the shell of a shrimp (Jonsson U.S. Pat. No. 2,784,450 and Ingalls U.S. Pat. No. 3,758,921).
The removal of meat from a crab presents special problems, which are not solved by the fluid pressure means provided by the methods and apparatus of the patents referred to above, which are designed for specific use with certain crustacea other than crabs. However, it has heretofore been proposed to remove the meat from crabs by jets of air or other fluid under pressure and this has been accomplished by apparatus in which the nozzle supplying the air jet is held by the hand of the machine operator and is directed toward crab body, this being disclosed in the U.S. Pat. Nos. to Greiner No. 965,706, Range No. 1,385,951, Ward Nos. 2,838,786 and 2,903,737 and Rossnan No. 3,696,465. In addition, the use of suction to remove meat from crabs is disclosed in the U.S. Pats. to Rossnan Nos. Re. 26,136, 3,257,683 and 3,274,640. There are, of course, many prior art machines and methods for preparing crabs for subsequent meat removal, but these do not relate to the present invention which provides a new and improved method and apparatus for meat removal.